Footnotes Read online

  An impotent people,

  Sick with inbreeding,

  Worrying the carcase of an old song.

  Anyway, I got drunk. And I can safely say it was the worst New Year’s Eve I have ever spent, and I speak as someone who has mingled with the crowds in Trafalgar Square, and heard the chimes at midnight, and seen the vomit floating in oily clumps in the churning fountains. Some of it mine.

  Speaking of which, Cardiff city centre on a sunny Saturday lunchtime in June is a lovely place to be. The streets are wide and bright. The shops and the covered markets are busy with a merry crowd. The drinkers are out of the pubs and on the pavements, easing into the long day. I pass a hugely energized gang of young men in black-and-white polo shirts with the words ‘Ben Jackson’s Stag Night’ on their breasts and lager slopping from their glasses. Round the next corner I find myself pushing past a man looking like Sherlock Holmes, and several women dressed as babies and bears. Close to the St David’s/Dewi Sant Shopping Centre there’s a large bronze statue of John Batchelor who, I can tell you now, was a local Liberal Victorian politician, businessman, anti-slavery campaigner and ‘friend of freedom’. If Gerald found himself standing here today, in front of this imposing statue, he would probably assume that Batchelor was a pivotal hero to the people of Cardiff and Wales. Although he’d more likely be distracted by the man in a romper suit drinking beer from a baby’s bottle.

  What else would Gerald think? His was not a literate culture, so he’d surely be impressed and overwhelmed by all the writing everywhere, on the shopfronts, in the newspapers, bookshops and on the magazines carried so casually. There’s lighting overhead – the electricity! – and a neon blaze from the shops. And the music. It’s everywhere, thumping from speakers and howling from the mouths of buskers. And although Gerald knew the Welsh as a musical people and very fond of the harp, he would not have been prepared for this incessant rhythm. Shops, shops, shops, all of them laden with goods and bounty from every corner of the globe, not that Gerald would know, but he would marvel at the mounded fish from the seven seas spread on the icy counters (the ice!), the sweets in every store, the sugar and the spices. So radiant and shiny. The colours! Our palette has stretched and it now glitters and throbs with gold and silver and hot pinks. And of course there’s glass in the windows, so much of it, and in our hands. And even on our noses. There are the paving stones underfoot, with no dirt or rivers of shit to negotiate, and the cars, trucks, motorbikes and even a unicyclist with a top hat. There’s a smell of sun cream in the air (coconut – what’s that?) and car fumes and cigarettes and vanilla-flavoured vape oils. Gerald said that no one ever had to beg in Wales, the people are so hospitable, but there’s a man here asking for spare change and a smoke, although Gerald would probably sign him on the spot to join his crusade. The people are no taller than in Gerald’s day, but their skin and hair and teeth must seem impossibly glossy and (I’m only guessing here) they are – to Gerald’s eyes – protein-packed and buoyant with muscle and fat. The clothing is startling: so colourful, and so many layers. The huge spongey shoes, with their laces. The zippers and buttons. The gold chains and hoops and precious jewels on display. The wealth. When Gerald was here in 1188 the people wore the same thin cloak and a tunic, all day and in bed at night; they had no deodorants. If he closes his eyes, all Gerald will hear is the animated ‘hissing of geese’ – the excitable and incomprehensible yak of the English – although that would also surprise him, because he knew the English as a silent race, ‘their outward fairness of complexion and their inward coldness of disposition’, whereas the Welsh were warm, voluble and dark. But, with his eyes closed, the Welsh also seem to have disappeared and so, he now realizes, have the Normans.

  From Cardiff to Margam Abbey, now an exciting adventure parkland on a hill overlooking the industrial south and the sea, then onwards to Neath and Swansea. Gerald keeps up a flow of stories about fairyland, and the slaughter of the English by the Welsh and vice versa. In Carmarthen, having crossed the River Tywi by boat, Baldwin recruits more crusaders, while Gerald informs us that Carmarthen’s name means ‘Town of Merlin’, because Merlin was discovered here ‘as the offspring of an incubus’ (that is, his human mother had become pregnant after sex with a male demon, which was unsurprisingly common in those days, but as Gerald always says, who are we to doubt these miracles?). In fact, rather dully, Carmarthen means a sea town with some walls, but that hasn’t stopped the locals from erecting a startlingly ugly wooden statue of the Welsh wizard on their high street, complete with pet dragon, staff, peaked hat, cascading beard, snake, wand, horn, owl and what may well be a flask of mead.

  I get a pleasant jolt when a man saunters past talking Welsh to his two young sons. There is no reason for my surprise, other than inexcusable London-centricity. As Wyn Griffith says in The Welsh:

  to the ordinary Englishman, the greatest of all strangenesses is a strange language in a familiar country. After crossing the Channel to France, he expects to hear French spoken, for he is in another country. But it is always a shock to him, in his own island as he would call it, to find his railway carriage – that familiar carriage in which he left London a few hours ago – invaded by people who speak a strange language among themselves, apparently from choice …

  There are probably more Welsh speakers alive today than there were in Gerald’s time, thanks to population growth and some vigorous recent campaigning, even if the proportion of Welsh speakers in Wales is much lower. When Wyn Griffith tries to define who the Welsh are, and God knows he’s not the only one, he falls back on the language. Without it, there’d be no real difference between them and their neighbours, he says, especially because he cannot, unlike Gerald, find a way to define the Welsh ‘race’. And yet this is how Gerald finishes his Description of Wales:

  Whatever else may come to pass, I do not think that on the Day of Direst Judgement any race other than the Welsh, or any other language, will give answer to the Supreme Judge of all for this small corner of the earth.

  I follow the man and his sons because I want to bathe, briefly, in the sound of their conversation. It is both familiar and incomprehensible. I feel a thrilling connection to an older land (even though this is happening, now) and back to Gerald, who we are fairly sure spoke Welsh but did not, unusually for him, like to boast about it. I hope I am not lurking in a sinister fashion, but anyway the man and his boys turn in to a barber shop and I carry on to take in the rest of the town. I am looking for a café, but there are surprisingly few. This is nothing like London, where every other place can sell you a jolt of caffeine and every other person is suckling a tub of sweet milky coffee, like a parade of hungry babies, unable to let go of their teats.

  It transpires that almost every shop in Carmarthen is a barber. And almost every man and boy, and mother with a boy on her lap, is inside getting a haircut. Gerald is very clear about this:

  Both the men and the women cut their hair short and shape it round their ears and eyes … The men shave their beards, leaving only their moustaches… You can find it in the book which Julius Caesar wrote … ‘the Britons shave their whole body except their upper lip.’ Sometimes they shave their heads, too, so that they can move more freely.

  Gerald also says that the Welsh care for their teeth better than he has seen in any other country, brushing with green hazel shoots and then burnishing them with woollen cloths ‘until they shine like ivory’. They also ‘daub their faces with shiny warpaint’.

  Wales, you see, has always been the home of the tattoo, short haircut, fresh shave, clean teeth and all-over body wax (but always sparing the moustache). I decide it would be wrong not to join them and in no time (there’s so much choice) find my scalp being kneaded and delicately teased by an early middle-aged, handsomely coiffed blond man from Neath who is fascinated by the fact that I’ve come from London and yet even so have entrusted him to look after my hair. I ask for the electric trimmers (No. four; my needs are simple) but he insists on hand-cutting each individual hair
with a tiny pair of silver scissors (‘I’ll bet they don’t do this for you in London’), and wants to know how much a similar service would normally cost. When I tell him £13 he subsides like a ruptured bouncy castle. He’d been harbouring a dream to move to London and make his fortune, and although I backpedal, and try to explain that I get my hair cut in Tooting, but in the centre of town he could make much, much more, he’s just not listening and a restless unhappiness settles on us both, while he snips and trims through the long afternoon with his sad little scissors. ‘Do tell them where you got your haircut’, he finishes at last, brightening just a bit, ‘when you get back to London.’ Ah yes, London. I’ll make sure I let them know.

  It really is a very fine haircut. And I feel proud to take it to Manorbier Castle, which is where Gerald was born and spent a happy childhood. Gerald doesn’t in fact go to Manorbier on his trip with Baldwin, so I shouldn’t really be here, but he writes so evocatively about his family home, and it’s really not so far off the trail (how he must have pleaded), that I make a quick detour. And what a place to grow up! The great grey castle is still standing on its hill, somewhat decayed and altered since Gerald’s day, but I think he would recognize at least one of the towers, and the river still rolls past the walls and down to the beach, where Gerald used to build sand-cathedrals (not castles, he tells us) so that his family knew, even when he was very young, that he would be a good man for the Church.

  He most certainly stood on this empty grey beach and watched the seagulls and skimmed these flat, red and black stones over the shallow waves. It is raining of course, a slight, drifting, soft rain, but that is what has saved this beach – this country – from ruinous tourism and other, earlier invaders. A man walks by slowly with his large dog, both of them sheltering underneath an even larger red umbrella. The only others here (and this is an afternoon in June) are one happy family, the three young children building dams in the river. It reminds me of my own family’s only Welsh holiday, when my brother and I spent a week, perhaps two, merrily pushing mud around in the rain while my parents sheltered in the lee of the camper van and wondered whether to go home early. Mostly (Henry I being an example Gerald would know) the English have packed up and headed for their dry beds rather than linger in this land of clouds. How much more vital and satisfying to invade Bordeaux, they must have felt, with its golden dunes and incomparable wines.

  The travellers reached St David’s at last, with Gerald chaffing at the presence of the current Bishop, Peter de Leia. He manages, somehow, to call him ‘a most friendly and hospitable man’. Or maybe he really did like him, although in the course of a long exposition on why St David’s always was and still should be at the head of an independent Welsh Church, Gerald does give Peter a backhanded slap when he says that every bishop sent from England to Wales just wanted to get back to the easy life of an English bishopric. What the place needs, says Gerald, is a Welsh bishop.

  He then vents some of his spleen by telling us the true story of a man ‘in our own days’ who ‘lying ill in bed’ was visited by every toad for miles around. His friends fought the toads with stick and sword, killing them in vast numbers, but in the end they had to put the man in a bag and hoist him to the top of a tall tree, with all the branches removed. Even that didn’t help. The toads crawled up the trunk and devoured every last scrap of their victim, until only his skeleton remained.

  The Bishop’s Palace in St David’s has risen and fallen to ruins since Gerald’s time, and the cathedral would be unrecognizable. There’s a choir practising for a concert tonight, so I sit at the back with a crowd of other sightseers and listen as the small choir, and an eight-person wind section, fills the nave with heavenly sound. I’m thinking of Gerald, of course, who yearned to be bishop here. He had the support of the local clerics and parishioners, but the English establishment was against him, from the king and the Archbishop of Canterbury down.

  In 1198, ten years after this trip with Baldwin, Bishop Peter de Leia died and Gerald saw one last chance to get his hands on the prize. He was even elected bishop by the local chapter – and they sent him to Rome to try and persuade Pope Innocent III to confirm the appointment, bypassing the English Church. But the Archbishop of Canterbury, now Hubert Walter, fought Gerald implacably, and King John could not be persuaded to make a decision (well, he told Gerald when he saw him that he was ‘right behind him’, and told the archbishop the same thing not long after); and after four long years of fight (he was even thrown into prison in France by the archbishop’s men, who had been told to look out for a tall man with voluminous eyebrows), he finally gave up. He lived for another twenty years, settling scores in his many books, and died in Lincoln or maybe Hereford aged over eighty.

  I leave St David’s for Cardigan, on the trail of the still vigorous Gerald, via tiny Nevern Church. The mist lifts a little and I sit on an ancient stone tomb in the shadow of a weeping yew and allow myself to be drugged by waves of wild garlic, until I remember the fate of the northern woman who defiled Saint Osana and I jump down in a hurry. In Cardigan, Baldwin preached in a green field just by the bridge and you can stand in the same spot, only slightly diminished by the passing cars, and contemplate the many miracles that were performed here after his visit, although as Gerald says, ‘I have no time to tell you about them.’

  The sun is out and I find myself wondering what, today, would persuade the men of Cardigan to gather in excited reverence and then sign up to fight a ferocious enemy in a faraway land. Well, there’s the plunder, of course. The forgiveness of all sins. Eternal life. The chance of a bit of sunshine, for Christ’s sake. But they must have known that one likely outcome was death or disfigurement. Gerald’s book is full of tales of women who try to prevent their men from joining the crusade – and here in Cardigan he tells us about a woman who seized her husband by the cloak and belt and ‘brazenly prevented him from taking the Cross’. Three nights later God punishes her by causing her to roll over and suffocate her young boy in her sleep, and she herself ‘sewed the sign of the Cross on her husband’s shoulder with her own hands’.

  The road out of Cardigan is marked as something called the ‘Saints and Stones Tour’, but I am not to be thrown off the scent of Gerald, who is now making his way along the beautiful banks of the River Teifi. I stop in Cenarth, because it was here, or hereabouts, that Gerald claimed to have seen some of the last beavers still living in Wales. The rest had been hunted to oblivion long before, as had all the beavers of England south of the River Humber, although Gerald had heard that there was also one stream in Scotland where the beavers still lolloped and gnawed and splashed and dammed and got on with their lives far from the hunters and their dogs.

  The last beavers of Britain were exterminated by humanity not long after Gerald’s tour, as indeed, at one time, were the wolf, the bear, the boar, the ox, the lynx, the walrus, the grey whale, the crane, the osprey, the pelican, the elk and the woolly mammoth, and so on and on and on … but now they, and some of the other lucky species, if they still exist elsewhere, are making a tentative return. Not here on the River Teifi, as yet, but in Devon on the River Otter and in two sites in Scotland. It all seems very grudging. The Scottish government has had to rush through a law confirming them as a ‘native’ species in order to protect them from gun-toting landowners. And the Angling Trust seems to imagine that the fish are going to be disturbed by the presence of these large herbivores, with whom, we shouldn’t really have to point out, they once co-evolved. Britain’s landscape was shaped by beavers. They were here long before us, and they bring abundance in their wake, an explosion of life in the ponds and dams and purified, meandering streams. They even help mitigate flooding. It is a catastrophic failure of imagination to think that we cannot once again share our land with these wondrous beings.

  The beavers of Gerald’s day had a sure-fire way of evading human hunters. They would castrate themselves. It is how they got their Latin name, Castor, Gerald assures us, even though it actually comes from the Greek wo
rd for ‘musk’. But it is well known that humans lust after a beaver’s testicles. Not in a sexual way, I think, although Gerald is not quite clear about this. When the hounds are hot on its heels the beaver will whip off its own balls and shake them from a safe distance at the pursuing hunters – and they will immediately call off the hunt. And sometimes when an already self-castrated beaver is being pursued, all he has to do is ‘rush to the top of a hillock, cock up one of his hind legs and show the hunter that the organs which he is really after have already been cut off’.

  Sadly, there are no longer any beavers getting busy on the banks of the bountiful River Teifi on which to test this theory, but one day, perhaps, they will return. And how much more beautiful everything would be if the beavers were here, with their shaggy dams spread across the river, close to where it now sparkles in the falls. The salmon would still flail and leap in their season. Dragonflies and frogspawn would dart and roll in the reeds. But even now, the path along the bank, although narrow and awkwardly speared with alder roots, is a magical place, impossible not to follow, slipping in the mud, entranced by the shimmer of midges in the faint, falling light on this long summer’s evening. The woods on either side are growing muted, darker, but still gentle with a greening of young ash and sycamore. A wood pigeon gives a throaty purr. And there, just around the next bend in the path, there is a huge greyhound waiting, watching my stumbling approach. There are no humans to be seen. The dog looks as if it has stepped out of the pages of Gerald’s book, wilder, more alert … undeniably medieval. I walk on – perhaps I shouldn’t – and the hound, long-haired, I now see, grey, close-packed, rangy, as tall as a wolf, bows from the front and dips its head and wags its tail and then, without warning, leaps up and thrusts its long hard nose into my groin. I just have time to notice that it has no collar – Oh dear God, it’s feral! – before I stumble back, shouting and sprawling into a juniper bush, flinging up my arms to protect my throat. And my groin. Sweet Jesus! Do we really want the beavers back? And the wolves? Why ever did I think it was a good idea? I have been transported into a Roald Dahl story. The man who wanted to see a rewilding of the world – our dreary, desiccated world – and who mocked Gerald’s faulty Latin and silly ideas about self-mutilating beavers, is now alone in the woods, far from help, about to be castrated by a wild dog. And torn apart by toads.